It isn't every day you see movie characters — from different movies — fraternizing after hours.

In fact, it isn't any day. Except for one recent day, in Paramus — when we saw Ulla, the sexy Swedish secretary from "The Producers" (1967), trading quips with Bancini, the chronic case from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975).

And that's only because Bergen County just happens to be home turf for actors Lee Meredith and Josip Elic.

"Go to vork!" says Meredith, channeling the "Swedish tease" who danced so distractingly for Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in the Mel Brooks comedy classic "The Producers."

"I'm tired," says Elic, channeling Bancini, the "chronic" mental patient that Jack Nicholson tried to prod back to life in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

These two have their timing down, and no surprise. They're stage colleagues, who have performed together on numerous occasions. They're lifelong pals, confidants, and sometime housemates. They were also — for a time — caregiver and -givee.

A couple of years ago Elic, now 97, suffered a fall in his New York apartment. It was decided, after he got out of the hospital, that he should move in with Meredith and her husband, producer Bert Stratford, at their home in River Edge. He was there for more than a year, before transferring to an assisted-living residence in Paramus 16 months ago.

Lee Meredith, the actress who appeared as Ulla in the original "The Producers" (1967), and actor Josip Elic, who played Bancini in the film version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975) have been friends for over forty years. Meredith and Elic first appeared together on stage in The Straight Man, The Comic and The Talking Lady in 1975. Meredith lives in River Edge and visited Elic at Brookdale Senior Living on Tuesday, December 11, 2018.(Photo: Amy Newman/Northjersey.com)

"He was living in New York all by himself," says Meredith, originally from Fair Lawn. "He had these steep stairs he was going up and down. His doctors said, 'You can't be alone any more.' So Joe came here, and things worked out pretty well. We're kind of his family now."

And Elic is duly grateful: "They were wonderful to me," he says. "Took care of me right and left. Changed my sheets, wouldn't let me go into the kitchen to wash my cup or anything."

But not so grateful that he'll allow Meredith to get the big laughs, if he can help it. "No one tops me in a scene," he says.

The two met — officially — in 1975, though they had crossed paths earlier.

As a matter of fact, they're both in "The Producers," though in different scenes. While Meredith got to heat up the screen as the blonde bombshell ("ve go to motel?") who was clearly not hired for her typing skills, Elic played a hapless violinist at a "continental" restaurant who has a whole bottle of champagne poured into his pants by a surly Zero Mostel.

Actor Josip Elic, who played Bancini in the film version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975) and Lee Meredith, not pictured, the actress who appeared as Ulla in the original "The Producers" (1967), and have been friends for over forty years. Meredith and Elic first appeared together on stage in The Straight Man, The Comic and The Talking Lady in 1975. Meredith lives in River Edge and visited Elic at Brookdale Senior Living on Tuesday, December 11, 2018.(Photo: Amy Newman/Northjersey.com)

At the time, Meredith and Elic didn't meet. What brought the two of them together, in the mid-1970s, was burlesque — an old entertainment tradition that both, in one way or another, had been tapping into throughout their careers.

"It was fun," Meredith says. "There was nothing dirty about it. It was always innocent. Nowadays you don't see anything like that."

The golden age of burlesque

Burlesque is only dimly remembered today. The musical "Gypsy" is all most people know about the world of strip-teasers and baggy-pants comics that was once a — slightly disreputable — American institution. As a matter of fact, Elic spent a lot of his early 20s in burlesque houses. Though mostly, he says, out of necessity.

"I was on the bum in Seattle, Washington, and you'd go into a burlesque house at noon for a quarter, and stay all day, and at 4 o'clock they'd throw you out," he recalls. "And then noon again, you'd go in, and everybody would be in there washing and cleaning. I fell in love with it. I had a place to stay, and I loved the comics, and their association with those beautiful women."

Lee Meredith, the actress who appeared as Ulla in the original "The Producers" (1967), and actor Josip Elic, not pictured, who played Bancini in the film version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975) have been friends for over forty years. Meredith and Elic first appeared together on stage in The Straight Man, The Comic and The Talking Lady in 1975. Meredith lives in River Edge and visited Elic at Brookdale Senior Living on Tuesday, December 11, 2018.(Photo: Amy Newman/Northjersey.com)

In the trade, Meredith is what would have been known as a "talking lady" — a sexpot, with lines, whose job is to trade blue banter with the comedian. That was essentially the kind of role she had in "The Producers," in "The Sunshine Boys" (both stage, 1972, and film, 1975), and on TV with Benny Hill, Jackie Gleason and other stars.

Not the kind of stuff that easily passes muster these days, in the #MeToo era (though a new generation of feminists has taken up burlesque as a girl-power exercise). But back then, Meredith was just one of many female actors taking Mostel's advice in "The Producers:" If you got it, flaunt it.

"I didn't think it was degrading, because I thought it was so much fun," she says. "My father was a photographer in the Air Force, and he had me doing cheesecake poses from the time I was 2 years old … I might not have worked if I hadn't done that."

The other two legs of the burlesque stool are the "straight man" and the "comic," and Elic has been both — depending on whether you saw him in "The World's Greatest Lover" (1977), "Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me" (1971) or that immortal Christmas classic, "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" (1964). "We had a ball. I loved doing it," Elic says.

Time we met

When Elic and Meredith formally met, and began working together in 1975, it was at a showcase at Manhattan Theatre Club called — what else? — "A Straightman, a Comic and a Talking Lady," later renamed "Burlesque Humor Revisited."

"We had so much fun in the burlesque show, and that was the beginning of working together," Meredith says.

Lee Meredith, the actress who appeared as Ulla in the original "The Producers" (1967), and actor Josip Elic, not pictured, who played Bancini in the film version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975) have been friends for over forty years. Meredith and Elic first appeared together on stage in The Straight Man, The Comic and The Talking Lady in 1975. Meredith lives in River Edge and visited Elic at Brookdale Senior Living on Tuesday, December 11, 2018.(Photo: Amy Newman/Northjersey.com)

Over the years, they did many other burlesque shows together, working with such luminaries as Red Buttons, Eddie Bracken, Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and the once-famous stripper Ann Corio. "We were all playing off each other," Elic says. "We all got along. It was a big love affair."

The two, Meredith and Elic, couldn't have more different backgrounds.

Elic, born Joseph Elich in Butte, Mont., had been a copper miner — "I had to work eight hours a day, 5,300 feet underground," he says — a bowling alley pin-setter, and a worker in Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps before a stint in the Army left him, at war's end, trying to crack Wall Street. A colleague suggested he try acting school, to improve his sales chops. He did. It was love at first scene. "I said, 'This is what I want to do,' " Elic remembers.

Meredith — born Judith Lee Sauls — was a dancer and high school color guard (Fair Lawn High School, class of 1965).

She went on to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she was spotted by producer Lore Noto in a showcase production of "Carousel." That's how she landed her role in "The Producers" — a big career boost for her, as it later was for Cady Huffman, who played a somewhat modified version of the same role in the hit 2001 Broadway musical.

Belying her dum-dum image in the film, Meredith actually did some research, trying to get the Swedish accent down. Not to mention the pronunciation of her signature line, "God dag på dig" ("good day to you").

"I learned that from the library," Meredith says. "I'm still not sure how you spell it. You know what happened? I went [overseas] for the opening, and I found out that people in Norway thought I was Danish, and people in Denmark thought I was Swedish. They all thought I was from one of those Scandinavian countries, but they didn't know which. They just knew it wasn't the one they were from."

At age 19, she didn't quite know she was working with the Zero Mostel, of "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Rhinoceros" (Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks were at the beginning of their soon-to-be-illustrious careers). But they all had fun, she says.

"People backstage, and the cameraman, would have me play jokes on [Mostel]," she recalls. "He would take a nap at lunchtime, so they'd have me go in and give him a big kiss, and he'd just go 'Rrrrrrrrrrr!' and start chasing me around like a big bear."

Elic, by this time, was already established as an actor onstage ("The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window," "Threepenny Opera") and TV (episodes of "Twilight Zone," "Peter Gunn," "The Phil Silvers Show"), and not just in comedy.

He brought both his burlesque and "legitimate" chops to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," where he had to play a dazed, confused mental patient. As a matter of fact, his big scene in the movie — it was filmed at an actual Oregon mental institution — was pure improv.

"I'm sitting down there on the bench watching them play basketball, and all of a sudden somebody is on my shoulders with their legs over my shoulders and over my head," he recalls. "It was Jack Nicholson. I got up and said, 'I'll play the game with him' and I started playing basketball. He had thighs like you wouldn't believe. Holy crap."

As the scene develops, Nicholson, on the shoulders of the 6-foot-3-inch Elic, tries to score baskets against the giant Chief Bromden (Will Sampson), while Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) watches grimly from a window.

"He said to me, 'If I fall, I close this picture down for a week'," Elic remembers. "I said, 'If I fall, I'll close this picture down for two weeks.' "

Lifelong friends

Throughout the '70s and '80s and beyond, Meredith and Elic remained close.

Elic baby-sat her daughter Erica (Meredith has two children). She and her husband brought Elic with them when her frequent-flyer miles, earned from a series of Miller Lite commercials, enabled them to travel to Thailand, Hong Kong, China and Singapore.

Both of them, committed animal activists, have gone on rescue expeditions together. Including one, many years ago, that involved trying to save a Muscovy duck from a frozen pond in Van Saun Park. It didn't end well.

"My favorite duck — Red — got frozen. His feet got frozen; his tail got frozen. He couldn't walk," she recalls. "Joe and I went to the duck pond to get him, because we could see he was having trouble. I took a big box, and a sheet to throw over him and capture him, and tried to get close."

Operative word: tried.

"She fell in the ice" — Elic indicates the waist — "up to here."

When they're out together — as they frequently are — people recognize them. They recognize Elic from "Cuckoo's Nest" and movies like "Black Rain" (1989) and "Great Day" (1977). They might recognize Meredith from "The Producers," "The Sunshine Boys," "Hello Down There" (1969), her two-plus years in "As the World Turns," her Miller Lite ad campaign with hard-boiled crime writer Mickey Spillane (she still has a cache of letters from Spillane), or her appearances on Regis Philbin's TV show marketing "Lee Strings," a brand of cheeky lingerie she created in the 1980s.

The question is: Which one do they recognize more? Elic, as we've seen, has a competitive streak.

"When we were in California, we would go to places like Disneyland, and people would notice him, but they wouldn't notice me," Meredith says. "And he would go, 'Ha! Ha! They recognized me, not you.' I would get so mad."

Email: beckerman@northjersey.com; Twitter: @jimbeckerman1

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